New Features in Edubuntu 12.10

Edubuntu is the Ubuntu flavour for education and children, it's based on Ubuntu and integrates additional software for use at home or in the classroom.

It's produced as a DVD image that can also be converted to an USB stick and includes support for most languages by default.

Edubuntu Applications

Stellarium has been dropped in favour of Kstars. Stellarium has big OpenGL demands that are hard to meet on ARM devices.

Tomboy has been re-introduced as the default note-taking application.

Language packs have now been moved off from the live image to a pool on the disc. This greatly improves install times at the cost of using more RAM in a live session when a local language is specified.

A new package called 'edubuntu-netboot' is introduced. This package now provides the functionality previously provided by ltsp-live and will also be used for casper-netboot.

Certain packages which are default in Ubuntu aren't installed in Edubuntu. These are avoided during installation, but due to current technical limits, can't be avoided during upgrades and may have to be manually removed after an upgrade. These packages include: icoutils, qt3-assistant, unity-lens-shopping and virtuoso-minimal. These can be removed using the Software Centre or by using "sudo apt-get remove icoutils qt3-assistant unity-lens-shopping virtuoso-minimal" from a terminal

Nepomuk and Akonadi icons are now hidden from menus.

The wallpaper selection has been updated.

Although no ARM release is made for Edubuntu 12.10, test builds have been done daily to ensure Edubuntu packages work on ARM. If you are running Ubuntu 12.10 on ARM, you may install the Edubuntu educational packages from the Software Center.

Desktop Interface

Update Manager has been streamlined and renamed Software Updater. It also now checks for updates when launched. Additionally, the release upgrader portion of Update Manager has become its own package - ubuntu-release-upgrader.

A new Xorg stack has been introduced which includes xserver 1.13 candidate versions, mesa 9.0, and updated X libs and drivers. The new xserver provides improved multiseat support, better smooth scrolling, and a large variety of bug fixes. There is a new version of the ATI driver, and the proprietary -nvidia driver now supports the RANDR standard for monitor configuration.

Unity and Compiz now works on hardware supporting only GLES instructions, releasing unity to a wide range of armel machines.

Jockey has been deprecated in favor of a "Drivers" component in software-properties.

The default partition mount point is now /media/username/ instead of /media/

Common Infrastructure

Secure Boot

Ubuntu 12.10 is the first Ubuntu release to support UEFI Secure Boot, a standard for controlling what software can be run on a computer. Supporting Secure Boot, a part of the Windows 8 certification requirements for client systems, ensures that Ubuntu will continue to provide an "it just works" experience on new hardware.

Due to time pressures, only some flavors released with 12.10 will install and boot on Secure Boot hardware:

Ubuntu desktop

Ubuntu server

Edubuntu

We expect to enable all other flavors in 13.04.

Migration-support deprecated

The tool responsible for migrating user accounts from other operating systems to Ubuntu (migration-assistant) has been removed from the installer.

Transitioning of the i386 generic-pae flavor to become the generic flavor offering

Collapsing of the virtual flavor back into the generic flavor

Homogenizing the entire linux-meta package

Arrival of a new highbank arm server kernel flavor

Changing of the default scheduler from cfq to deadline

Packaging updates for signed kernels

Python 3.2

The Ubuntu desktop has begun migrating from Python 2 to Python 3. Most Python applications included in the desktop and their dependent libraries have been ported to Python 3. In most cases, Python 3 versions of libraries are available alongside their Python 2 counterparts. Ported applications will only run with Python 3. Work will continue in Ubuntu 13.04.

If you have your own programs based on Python 2, fear not! Python 2 will continue to be available (as the python package) for the foreseeable future. However, to best support future versions of Ubuntu you should consider porting your code to Python 3. Python/3 has some advice and resources on this.

Java Toolchain

Ubuntu 12.10 ships OpenJDK7 as the default Java implementation. This brings improved performance, new features and better compatibility with other Java 7 implementations.

Use of the OpenJDK6 is now deprecated and the openjdk-6-* packages in universe for Ubuntu 12.10 will not be provided in future releases of Ubuntu.

Installation

Overview

Preparing your computer for Edubuntu is now much simpler, with a wider range of disk setup options. Each of these are detailed at length to provide you with a clear understanding of the actions that will take place with your selection.

You can now reinstall or upgrade an existing copy of Edubuntu with the DVD installer, provided that your computer is connected to the Internet.

Download

System Requirements

The minimum memory requirement for Edubuntu 12.10 is 512 MB of memory but 1024 MB is highly recommended. Note that some of your system's memory may be unavailable due to being used by the graphics card. If your computer has only the minimum amount of memory, the installation process will take longer than normal; however, it will complete successfully, and the system will perform adequately once installed.

It's recommended to use the i386 image for computers with less than 1GB of memory. For these systems, installing using the "Install Edubuntu" option from the DVD boot menu will also be faster as it'll save some memory (compared to the "Try Edubuntu without installing" option).

When using Edubuntu 12.10 as an LTSP server, you should plan at least an additional 256 MB per client.

The Edubuntu 12.10 installation image does not include support for old computers that do not support PAE.

Upgrading

Upgrading from Edubuntu 12.04

To upgrade from Edubuntu 12.04 on a desktop system, press Alt+F2 and type in "update-manager -d" (without the quotes) into the command box. Update Manager should open up and display following message: "New distribution release '12.10' is available. Click Upgrade and follow the on-screen instructions".

Upgrading from Other Releases

Users of other Edubuntu releases need to upgrade first to 12.04, and then to 12.10.

Known Issues

Edubuntu being based on Ubuntu, most known issues of Ubuntu also apply to Edubuntu, below is a list of Edubuntu specific known issues and the current list of Ubuntu known issues.

Specific to Edubuntu

Unity 2D is no longer available in 12.10. As a result, the Gnome Fallback session (also known as the "Ubuntu Classic") will now be made default when LTSP is selected. LTSP users who wish to continue using Unity-2D should remain on Edubuntu 12.04 LTS.

In some cases, the session indicator shows up empty on LTSP. This appears to be related to the video card of the thin client. The only known workaround at this stage is to call "gnome-session-quit" manually. (1028972)

Installation

Booting the Ubuntu installer in UEFI mode from a USB disk on certain Samsung laptops (530U3C, NP700Z5C) may trigger a firmware bug that renders the machine unbootable. Users are advised to use caution when installing on Samsung laptops and ensure that they are configured for legacy BIOS mode, not UEFI mode. (1040557)

The consolidation of desktop installation media into a single image means that some installation options that were previously available on the alternate CD have no direct replacement on the desktop image.

Users who were installing using the alternate CD to install with LVM or full-disk encryption can now use the desktop image for this.

To install LTSP, please install using the Ubuntu Server 12.10 image, then add ltsp after installation. You can also continue to install with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS media and upgrade to 12.10 from there.

There are several options for installing using software RAID. You can:

The desktop image installer cannot unlock existing encrypted (LUKS) volumes. If you need to make use of existing encrypted volumes during partitioning, then use the "Try Ubuntu without installing" boot option to start a live session, open the encrypted volumes (for example, by clicking on their icons in the Unity launcher), enter your password when prompted to unlock them, close them again, and run ubiquity to start the installer. (1066480)

ARM OMAP4 machines will sometimes boot to a black screen during installation. It's likely that the system has booted fine, but you will need to switch to another tty then back to tty7 (Ctrl+Alt+F1 and then Alt+F7) to get graphics. (1065902)

On ARM Panda boards with no external storage attached, the installer interface will be confusing and installation is likely to fail. We strongly recommend attaching an external hard disk when installing on Panda boards. (1053030)

On a mac with an external display can not run in framebuffer mode error occurs on the 2nd reboot onwards. (1066883)

Kernel

On some systems, when opening lid, there is a kerneloops with a suspend/resume failure message seen. (1054732)

On certain ASUS machines with AMD graphic chips, a WMI event and ACPI interrupt are sent at the same time when hitting the hotkey to change display mode, resulting in the display mode being changed twice in succession. Users can work around this using the Displays panel in System Settings for changing display modes. (1052278)

On ASUS N53SN laptops, the kernel does not boot without noefi on commandline. (1053897)

Networking

In order to improve compatibility with other local nameserver packages, NetworkManager now assigns IP address 127.0.1.1 to the local nameserver process that it controls instead of 127.0.0.1. If the system's /etc/resolv.conf is absent or is a static file instead of the symbolic link to ../run/resolvconf/resolv.conf installed by default then this static file will have to be updated by the administrator in order to continue using the NetworkManager-controlled nameserver.

Libvirt

Windows vms which previously worked with 'vga' video now need 'cirrus' video.

Toolchain

Python 2.7.3 includes a fix for a security vulnerability affecting Python's dict and set implementations. Carefully crafted, untrusted input could lead to extremely long computation times and denials of service. Although disabled by default, vulnerable applications such as CGI scripts can explicitly enable "hash randomization" to prevent this exploit. Due to implementation details of this fix, virtualenvs created with older 2.7.x releases may not work with 2.7.3. Specifically, the os module may not appear to have a urandom function. This problem can be solved by recreating the broken virtualenvs with the newer Python 2.7.3 version. See http://bugs.python.org/issue13703 for full details. (954595)

VMware Player

Installing either version 4 or 5 of VMware Player on Ubuntu 12.10 will trigger a crash report regarding lsb_release, because the lsb_release command uses Python 3 but the VMware installation environment overrides the Python settings to point to a bundled version of Python 2. (938869) It is unknown what impact this has on VMware Player at runtime.

Trident Cyberblade - As the vesa driver doesn't work with this chip-set the only solution is to remain with 12.04.

Intel i810 - A new install can only be accomplished from the Alternate ISO. On reboot go to Recovery Mode and delete the video driver. apt-get remove xserver-xorg-video-intel This will also remove xserver-xorg-video-all but this is only a meta package and isn't needed. On reboot create suitable xorg.conf or use RandR to get correct resolution if necessary.